


are we in the clear yet?

by awesomeaislin



Series: Carry On Countdown 2018 [10]
Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, DEC 04 - Angst Day, Sad, kind of ambiguous though, relatively happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 05:18:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16847884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awesomeaislin/pseuds/awesomeaislin
Summary: Agatha isn't ok. Agatha wonders if she'll ever be ok."The what ifs are eating her alive, and there’s nothing she can do about it."





	are we in the clear yet?

**Author's Note:**

> Alright so this is about Agatha, but lets face it, this is really about me. Have fun reading about my personal troubles.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s small things. It’s the way her heart lurches when someone mentions the UK. It’s the way she reaches for the phone, but doesn’t know what to say. 

 

She was happy for a while she thinks. She was. It was the right decision. To leave it all behind. To run.

 

But now it’s all she thinks about. What if it had been different? What if she had stayed with her friends? What if she hadn’t abandoned ship?

 

Sometimes she thinks she should just swallow her pride and go back, but she’s afraid of what they’ll say. Her old friends, her family, everyone really. 

 

She’s not completely unhappy here. Not when she’s with her friends. Not when she plays the guitar. Not when she walks her dog. She’s not completely unhappy, but there’s something. A thought. Quiet, but deafening. 

 

The what ifs are eating her alive, and there’s nothing she can do about it. 

 

“Are you alright,” her new friend’s ask when she goes quiet. Even here they expect things from her. The pretty girl can never be down, or upset, or angry. She always has to be pleasant and put on a smile and pretend everything is ok. 

 

“I’m fine,” Agatha says. But she not. She wonders if she’s ever been less fine in her life. She decides to message Penny. Maybe she’ll know what to do.

 

“Hey,” Penny says. But it’s empty. Agatha isn’t a part of their lives anymore. She chose to leave. She abandoned them. It’s her own fault. Maybe the worst part is knowing that. 

 

“Hi,” She puts on a smile, and hopes Penny doesn’t see through it. Penny tells her about Simon and how he’s doing and how he’s suffering, and Agatha knows that she isn’t allowed to talk about this thing she’s going through because Simon has it worse because Penny has it worse because even Baz has it worse. 

 

The empty feeling subsides a little as Penny talks. Just a little. It’s a relief that it’s absent for now though. But the moment she hangs up, it comes crashing down again, and Agatha feels like she’ll never breathe again. She feels like maybe it’s worse knowing how bad everything is. 

That she abandoned her friends so that she could feel better, and she doesn’t even feel better. 

 

So she throws herself into the work around her. She spends all of her time with her friends, or doing school work, and she exercises to work out the emptiness to give her something to waste all this energy on. 

 

She runs so much that her friends jokingly ask if she’s running away from something. “No”, she lies, “I’m just training.” 

 

She doesn’t think about them. She can’t think about them. 

 

She runs and she runs and she runs until she’s wearing herself thin. Until her friends tell her they might be worried, but she can’t stop. If she stops moving, she’ll have to deal with it, and she can’t deal with it. 

 

She can survive. She can endure. She doesn’t think about them. 

 

Most of the time at least. 

 

But there are still days when it all comes crashing down. Days that remind her that she’s not really alright. That all of this is fake. This outward happiness is just a show. 

 

One day she’s running on the treadmill. 16 songs and she’ll have ran over four miles. Her knee will hurt so badly tomorrow, and she’ll run again anyway. It’s what’s keeping her from exploding. 

 

She’s running and running and running, and then she’s listening to a happy song, and sobbing. ‘The Cure’ by Little Mix is by no means a sad song. It’s upbeat and wonderful, but she’s crying and running and crying. 

 

She gets off the treadmill, and she wonders what it will feel like when she’s ok again. She wonders if she’ll know when it happens. She wonders if there will be a moment where she thinks, yes better all cured, or if it’ll just come to her years from now that she doesn’t worry anymore. 

 

One day, she leaves class crying. She doesn’t know why she’s crying. Nothing bad happened. She has so many things due next week. She’s so stressed, and she has no outlet. Maybe that’s why she’s crying. 

 

A friend sees her, puts her around her, and walks her to her dorm. “What’s wrong?” She asks on the way. 

 

“I don’t know,” Agatha says, and she really doesn’t. Where would she even start, ‘well, you see, I have all this unresolved trauma that I can’t seem to work through, so I just have these breakdowns every ten minutes, no need for concern, but like probably a need for concern.’ As if. 

“That’s ok,” Her friend says. “It’ll be ok.” She wonders how people can lie to her like this. She feels like she’ll never be ok. 

 

Agatha nods and she goes back to her dorm and she angry screams/cries Taylor Swift songs on the guitar until she has to be somewhere. She must be driving her roommates insane. 

 

She focuses back on getting through it. If she just keeps her head down and keeps working and stops thinking about it, it will get better, right? It has to get better, right?

 

But it doesn’t. It gets worse. Her knee hurts so much she can’t walk. Her eyes leak so much she tells people that that’s just a normal thing. She doesn’t wear mascara anymore then they can’t tell she’s cried. It doesn’t matter anyway: she’s rubbed her eyes so most of her eyelashes have fallen out. She doesn’t look in the mirror anymore. She doesn’t want to see. 

 

Her mum calls her everyday, and she picks up and says everything is ok, and that she’s happy, and she’s excited to come home for Christmas. She’s not. 

 

She nearly has a mental breakdown at the airport. She doesn’t know if she can get on this plane. This plane takes her back to everything she’s trying to escape. 

 

But she gets on because she’s been taught not to make a seen. She never makes a scene. She does homework on the plane so she can’t think about it. It’s a long flight, and she does so much homework that she wonders if she’ll even have to do any work for the first month of classes. Well, if she can’t do work that means her knee is really in for it this time. 

 

She debates whether or not she can just stay on the plane and never get off, but the person behind her needs to leave, so she exits. Her parents and Penny and Simon and Baz are at baggage claim, and she smiles and laughs and hugs everyone. 

 

“Are you ok?” Simon asks when they get a moment of quiet.

 

“Are you?” She responds because he has it worse. 

 

“No,” Simon shakes his head. “Maybe I’ll get there though.”

 

Agatha nods. Maybe she will too. 


End file.
